About

Brooke Holmes is the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Classics at Princeton University. Her research interests focus on the history and philosophy of concepts, particularly those related to the physical body, nature, and life in ancient Greek and Roman textual sources. She explores the problems these concepts create for theorizing the subject and forms of ethical and political agency. Holmes is also interested in the reception of these concepts and issues, especially in twentieth and twenty-first century continental philosophy, examining how reception communities conceptualize their relationship to the Greco-Roman past and imagining new forms of relation between that past and the present. Her areas of specialization include ancient Greek medicine and life sciences, ancient philosophy, Greek literature—particularly Homer and tragedy—Lucretius, reception studies, literary theory, medical humanities and bioethics, environmental humanities, gender and sexuality studies, and twentieth-century French philosophy. Holmes holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University, an M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University, and a D.E.A. in Études grecques from the Sorbonne (Paris-IV). Since 2007, she has taught at Princeton in the Department of Classics and served as the Director of the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in the Humanities from 2015 to 2018. She remains active on the IHUM Executive Committee and serves on the Executive Committee of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism. Holmes is an affiliated faculty member of the Department of Comparative Literature, the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the University Center for Human Values, and an associated faculty member of the Program in the History of Science and the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• History
• Epistemology
• Social psychology
• Psychology
• Law
• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Classics
• Literature
• Media studies
• Anthropology
• Art
• Public relations

Selected publications

• Sympathy, Antipathy, and the Nature of Occult Qualities in Galen and Jean Fernel

  Palgrave studies in medieval and early modern medicine · 2026-01-01

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  PublisherDOI

• The Early History of ‘Natural’ Sympathy

  2025-05-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter follows how the language of ‘sympathy’ (sumpatheia) reshapes the semantic ground of pity (eleos, oiktos) in Greek between the fourth and the first centuries bce. It argues that, by tracing the rise of intersubjective ‘sympathy’, we can better resist contemporary deployments of ‘universal’ or ‘natural’ sympathy as spontaneous evidence of a common humanity and instead focus on analysing the ethics and politics around claims of emotional identification. The chapter also complicates genealogies of sympathy that begin in modernity while also rejecting sympathy as a hallmark of ‘classical’ Greek humanism. Rather, it shows how intersubjective ‘sympathy’ first starts to take form in writings influenced by natural philosophy as the problem of ‘contagious affect’, which slips below the threshold of cognitive evaluation characteristic of pity in classical Greek sources. It then traces how sympathy begins to merge with pity, especially in Hellenistic historiographers narrating the rise of Rome as a ‘philanthropic’ empire. It argues that sympathy emerges in the last centuries bce as a strategically compelling sign of universal human kinship.

  PublisherDOI

• On the Sympathetic Community of the Body and the Soul in Book 3 of Lucretius: Loving Life and Learning to Face Death

  2025-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• <i>An Archaeology of Disability</i>: A Dialogic Essay

  Classical Antiquity · 2024-10-01

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  An Archaeology of Disability is a research station designed for the Venice Biennale, Architettura 2021 by David Gissen, Jennifer Stager, and Mantha Zarmakoupi and exhibited later at La Gipsoteca di Arte Antica of Pisa in 2022, at the Canellopoulos Museum of Athens in 2023, and at the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki in 2024. The research station works with languages and forms used by contemporary disabled people to reproduce elements—a ramp, a seat, an art gallery—from the ancient Acropolis in Athens that vanished long ago and that have little or no extant material forms. Among the many people who contributed to the research station are two performers, Christopher Tester and Pia Hargrove, who performed, respectively, the ekphrastic film and audio description Sēmata (Signs) (2021). The following dialogic essay draws on conversations with the curators and performers led by Brooke Holmes and Pasquale Toscano. This dialogic form surfaces some of the collaborative aspects of the research station to highlight the ways in which such collaboration brings different lenses to antiquity.

  PublisherDOI

• Variations in media framing of movements in China, France, and the U.S.: An intersectional approach

  British Journal of Sociology · 2024-10-05 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  Current literature often links contentious protests with media hostility, showing that news outlets typically portray protests involving disruption or violence in a negative light. Contesting this literature, this work introduces an intersectional approach-focusing on geopolitics, protest goals and actions-to theorize divergences in the media framing of protests that entail violence. To illustrate these divergences, we use mixed methods-network analysis and content analysis-to examine an original dataset on U.S. media coverage of three large movements in different countries. These movements share similarities in their anti-status quo goals and contentious actions but differ in geopolitical locations: one taking place in the U.S., the second in a U.S. ally country, and the third in a non-ally country. As the first to apply network analysis in movement-media studies, this comparative study contributes to a systematic examination of media framing variations both within and across social movements. This work also complicates our understanding of violence and media representation by introducing a theoretically-informed approach that considers multiple factors simultaneously.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Does Violent Protest Receive Negative Coverage?—Media Framing of Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Bill Movement and French Yellow Vest Movement

  International Journal of Sociology · 2023 · 6 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Media studies

  Regarding media framing of protests, current studies have primarily focused on the negative side of framing tools, that is, marginalization devices that news media employ to belittle and demonize a protest. Yet little scholarship has scrutinized the positive side of framing tools, i.e., affirmation devices that mass media adopt to convey sympathy for and approval of a protest. Through comparing U.S. media coverage of two recent large anti-government movements taking place in China and France—the movements sharing similarities in vital factors impacting media coverage—this paper illustrates a series of affirmation devices, including highlighting issues and downplaying violence, blaming violence on authorities, stressing public approval, backing protest goals, and understating a movement's dark side. A systematic examination of affirmation devices contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of media framing and the relations between the media and social movements. This exploration also challenges the popular conception that violence by protesters typically leads to negative media coverage.

  PublisherDOI

• Music

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc eBooks · 2023-01-01

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  <JATS1:p>This book explores the pivotal role played by ancient mousike—in all its facets—in the development of musical practices and ideas throughout history. Since antiquity, music has consistently played a significant role in social and cultural life, and although the terms in which it is expressed and the cultural meanings it conveys vary dramatically across different times and geographies, the influence of the ancient Greek concept on modern Western notions is nevertheless striking.</JATS1:p> <JATS1:p>In a series of lucid and engaging thematic chapters, Eleonora Rocconi surveys the roles and functions of music from classical antiquity, through the Renaissance and early modern eras, and up to the present day. The discussion is structured around the key concepts, theoretical models, and aesthetic issues at play – from the educational and therapeutic value of music to its place in the ideal of cosmic harmony and its relationship to the senses and emotions – as well as the function of music in debates around individual and cultural identity. What emerges is a timely reassessment of the paradigmatic value of the Greek model in the musical reception of antiquity in different historical periods. It highlights the ongoing contribution of mousike to modern cultural debates within the realms of classics, musicology, philosophy, aesthetics, anthropology, performance, and cultural studies, as well as in artistic environments, and offers a clear and comprehensive account of its inexhaustible source of inspiration for musicians, theorists, scholars, and antiquarians across the centuries.</JATS1:p>

  PublisherDOI

• Canguilhem and the Greeks: Vitalism Between History and Philosophy

  History, philosophy and theory of the life sciences · 2023 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • Epistemology
  • Literature

  Abstract In this essay, I examine the role of ancient Greek medicine and philosophy in Georges Canguilhem’s analysis of vitalism at the intersection of history and philosophy in his essay “Aspects of Vitalism” in light of larger questions about the historicity of “life” as a concept in the history and philosophy of science and contemporary biopolitical theory. Vitalism, for Canguilhem, is not a proper object of the history of science. But nor is it a philosophy that exists outside of historical time. I show how Canguilhem embeds vitalism both historically and trans-historically by threading each of its three “aspects” in the essay through ancient Greece. Canguilhem distinguishes his own understanding of both life and vitalism from that of the “classical” vitalists of the eighteenth century by refusing to read ancient Greece as romantically naïve or pre-technological and instead locating a dialectic between vitalism and mechanism already in antiquity. I argue for a critical re-reading of Canguilhem’s own conjunction of vitalism and Hellenism that resists its figuration of ancient Greece as the place where the human qua species first comes to take itself as an object of knowledge. I instead propose reading ancient Greek medical and philosophical texts that are read and reread in debates about the nature of human life and the life of Nature over millennia as part of a milieu that shapes how contemporary thinkers theorize life in the interest of human flourishing.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Sport

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

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  Modern sport cannot be understood without ancient sport. Sport saturates contemporary society and the global reach of sport and its intense popularity characterizes the modern world. But, at the same time, sport is one of the most ancient human pursuits. In the globalized sport of today, the type of athletic performance and the ideology of sport and its apparent origins are mostly derived from the model of one pre-modern civilization: Graeco-Roman antiquity. Juxtaposing ancient writers with recent ones, including the modern Olympic founder Pierre de Coubertin and physical fitness impresario Bernarr Macfadden, and by examining the representation of sport in Olympic films, Miller demonstrates the ancient heritage of contemporary sport, and the creative ways in which ancient sport has been adapted, appropriated, mishandled and reimagined. Sport today contains a surprising contradiction: its explicit modernity (from its technological sophistication and integration into capitalist markets to its institutionalization and celebrity culture) and

  PublisherDOI

• Frontmatter

  Edinburgh University Press eBooks · 2021

  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science

  From archaeological sites to papyri and manuscripts, we experience the ancient world through its material remains. This materiality may be tangible: from vases to votive offerings and statues to spearheads.

  DOI

Frequent coauthors

• Emily Greenwood

  16 shared

• David Konstan

  16 shared

• Emily Hauser

  University of Exeter

  16 shared

• Pavlos Avlamis

  16 shared

• Irene Peirano Garrison

  16 shared

• Serafina Cuomo

  16 shared

• Dorothy Kempf

  Princeton University

  16 shared

• Christina S. Kraus

  16 shared

Awards & honors

• 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship